Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese emoji. Emoji, like this set for the iPhone, is a pre-set collection of small pictures that reflect actions, feelings, and locations in small, cute pictures:

Each of the approx. 10,000 sentences in Melville’s original text has been reinterpreted in the emoji ‘language’ via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers and published with funds from Kickstarter.

Last week, the Library of Congress announced that Emoji Dick would be catalogued and added to the history books as the first-ever emoji title. Gaze upon it!

The Library of Congress, the world’s largest repository of knowledge and information, began a multiyear “Celebration of the Book” with an exhibition on “Books That Shaped America.” The initial books in the exhibition are displayed below.

“This list is a starting point,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “It is not a register of the ‘best’ American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.”

We hope you will view the list, nominate other titles, and most importantly, choose to read and discuss some of the books on this list, reflecting America’s unique and extraordinary literary heritage, which the Library of Congress makes available to the world.